“Gentlebeings, I’ve covered his life in great detail. He’s an underachiever who thinks he’s better than he seems willing to produce. He tends toward loquacity—”
“Excuse me. Loquacity?” asked Taste Dynamics, a gaunt woman devoid of outward sexual characteristics.
“Talkativeness, inability to keep his mouth shut.”
“Thank you.”
“To continue, he had a three-point-two GPA through high school and college and not a single one of his teachers seems to be able to remember him. He never joined a fraternity.”
“Simulations?”
“The models we’ve built show a seventy-eight percent chance that our subject will be taken into GAM and a twenty percent chance that they’ll destroy him outr—”
“Wouldn’t his destruction impact our overall goal?” interrupted Pudgy.
“Even if they kill him, there’s a sixty-three percent chance our plan will succeed anyway.”
“Sixty-three? Planning on sixty-three percent seems on the weak side to carry any action forward,” commented Percomm Systems.
“We aren’t planning on sixty-three percent, but rather seventy-eight percent plus sixty-three percent of twenty percent or a total of ninety point six percent chance, or less than a ten percent of failure,” he said directly to Pudgy. Nanogate’s eyes then cast about the rest of the membership. “Let me add that the worst thing that can happen with a failure is that we’ve lost one insignificant employee. We can then choose to either pick a new pawn or we can look at a new plan.”
No more discussion presented itself. Several attendees physically as well as mentally closed their folders on this topic. Not one of these individuals clawed their way to the pinnacle of power without using people. Only one had yet to directly order a person killed. None even hesitated at the use of one more. The choice passed without debate.
* * *
Sonya opened the door to the outer foyer. A tiny, weasel-like man, impeccably dressed in a tailored three-piece Kao Brothers suit, held a caramel-colored Chihuahua in his lap. The tiny dog, no larger than a dessert plate, shivered constantly. The situation wasn’t right, but Sonya motioned them into her examining room anyway. The seemingly sterile room looked like something out of an old medical flattie, with an examination table, removable paper covers, a small and uncomfortable chair, a swivel stool, and all manner of antiquated, shiny, and manual-oriented medical equipment.
“You do know that owning an animal in the state of Oregon is a felony? And a capital offense at that?” Sonya asked these questions of all her new customers as a matter of policy.
He hugged the dog tighter to himself as it squirmed in place. “Yes, but I’ve bought the police in my precinct.”
She nodded. Anyone who could own a Kao Brothers suit obviously held some clout. This one obviously swung his with abandon. “A different solution than most of my clientele, but completely acceptable. Payment is due now. I take actual credit slips, plastic money, proteins, plants, medicines, charcoal, or chocolate.” Her customer looked up sharply at that last. She smiled brightly. “I have a weakness for chocolate, but finding a supply is difficult.” Cocoa was another plant which no longer grew on Earth.
“I can pay with any of those you wish in the future, but would prefer electronic credit.”
“No. I have no electronics in my home. No motors, no computers, no vidlinks, no technology I can do without.”
“Greenie?”
“I’m a member of the Greenpeace organization, but I don’t participate in any of their foolish extreme actions.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m not. I just wish the world were a slightly different place. I was born in the wrong age. Two hundred years ago, there were no prohibitions to keeping animals and there were only a handful of creatures on the endangered species list.” Sonya paused, looking thoughtfully into space. Her customer remained politely silent. “Anyway, enough of that. So I won’t take electronic credit. Hell, I don’t even have an account.”
“Everyone has an electronic account. You have one programmed from birth.”
“You’re assuming my birth was recorded.”
Enlightenment showed in his eyes. Sonya had all but informed him that she belonged to that expendable minority known as Nils. They had no existence. They were in no way protected.
“As you were unprepared, I’ll examine your pet for free.”
“Thank you.” He stiffly handed the dog to her, both arms outstretched and both shaking nearly as badly as the tiny dog.
Her hands didn’t hesitate. From under the examination table, she pulled up an antique, silenced Berretta, pointing it at the man’s head and pulling the trigger. For all its age, the gun delivered a quiet pop that efficiently deposited his brains in a red mess across the back wall. She caught the dog as the corpse’s arms stopped receiving commands and flopped down with the rest of the body into a heap on the floor.
The tiny dog yipped at her, more in surprise than any outrage at the man’s death. Sonya knew he wasn’t the dog’s master. The man didn’t know how to handle an animal and this one certainly didn’t belong to him. She tut-tutted to herself for the growing red puddle and the mess she’d need to clean up sometime later.
Shifting the dog to the crook of her left arm, she opened her victim’s jacket with her right and searched for some identification. The expired Private Enforcement license for one Auzel Small confirmed her suspicions. Someone wanted her out of the way. Knowing PEs, only the person who hired him would care about his disappearance. Her only concern involved the patron’s intent for finding her—either her clandestine work as a vet, or even more clandestine membership in the Green Action Militia.
Sonya shrugged. It didn’t matter either way, except for any follow-on attempts. In the meantime she’d inherited another dog and, she thought as she looked down at the body, more food for her animals.
* * *
Their Rose Quarter expeditions had started as a lark between himself and Carmine. They hobnobbed with the lower class, getting a vicarious thrill at being so close to the edge. Over the last year Tony’s outings had become more and more frequent, with or without his companion. Tony fidgeted with a tiny scrap of infamous blue TriMet seat fabric that had come loose. He all but leapt from his seat as the lift-bus landed.
The thickening of a rising fog, typical of the lower deck ghetto of Portland’s Rose Quarter, added a dingy feel to the air. In spite of this, Tony’s steps grew livelier as he walked out the TriMet doors. The slight wrinkle above his thick black eyebrows smoothed out as he relaxed.
Throngs of the poor, wretched, and homeless scurried by outside heavily armored doors and the many open, gaping holes in the abandoned lowest levels of the city. Garishly signed tube hotels, with their two-point-five meter long plastic coffin-shaped sleeping quarters for those lucky few who could afford even their modest prices, provided an eerie, if erratic, illumination.
A token girl, her State of Oregon prostitution tattoo prominently displayed over one shoulder, wriggled her barely clad and unnaturally firm breasts against Tony’s arm as he wound his way past her beat. Next to her, a man without a left leg hobbled on the other and a crutch bearing a filthy plastic sign claiming “Veteran. Praise God. Please help.” Tony didn’t even register either of them as individuals, but rather part of the background one endured to attend the hottest clubs.
The transition from barrio to city hot-spot came without a marked delineation, yet the line definitely existed. No mugger passed a certain crack in the sidewalk, no bum caged a drink outside any club, no welf paraded her children past that unseen barrier. Here an armored Metro cruiser glided slowly past, punctuating the amount of money circulating in this tiny section of street level. One block in either direction, and the anarchy of the-fittest-will-survive reigned.
A glaring solido of a red rose slowly dying marked Tony’s favorite watering-hole only a few doors down. The doorman cum bouncer, with two massive
, silver-colored prosthetic arms, nodded deferentially to Tony as he entered.
“Hi, Jock. You get your arms readjusted?”
“Nope, still got that flutter in one. I almost broke a jug’s skull with it yesterday.”
“I know a good mechanic.”
“So do I, Mr. Tony,” the big man said with a grin. “Carmine’s waiting for you.”
“Thanks.”
Typical of any night, the biomass of people in the Wilted Rose threatened to burst the building like an overripe plum. While not an olfactory bar, the bittersweet smell of lilies, probably two or three OU higher than comfort level, tweaked his nose. Ignoring it as irrelevant, Tony wedged, bumped, and shoved his way to the bar amidst the vocal stylings of the Communist Bananas, twenty decibels above the level that would cause harm to most deaf rocks.
“Bloody Mary,” he shouted at the bartender. He cast about to find his girl. For once his height came in handy, for he could look above most people. He spotted her behind a pair of nude girls interlocked in a trib so sexual as to edge on even the loose moral codes enforced by the Rose’s establishment. Carmine decorated a booth on the other side of the writhing pair with her long, silver hair contrasting with her loose, neon-green dress. She frantically waved and yelled to get his attention. “Make that two. And two scotch and sodas,” he screamed, correcting his order.
Tony desired a partner to take his lead without much question—a difficult find in a world of “Do first before done to.” He always knew Carmine’s charms amounted to something more ornamental and empathic than intelligent.
Holding four drinks high above his head, Tony wound his way to the booth, ignoring three blatant passes, one from an ambi. He managed to only stain his floral print shirt with a moderate splash from one glass or the other on his way through the crush. He parted the booth shield—a layer of charged air particles held in a matrix of electric white noise—with his elbow and moved in. He silently praised Carmine for keeping the sound shield up. It lowered the racket and press of the room to a minimum whisper. Carmine greeted him with a bright smile of blood-red teeth and complementing lipstick.
“Weeble, but that band is loud tonight,” he said a bit too loudly, depositing the drinks on the table.
“Yeah, I heard the Rose staff paid the Metros a bit extra so they wouldn’t show,” said the lithe woman in a voice barely louder than bedroom-talk.
“Now, that’s a job. I should’ve been a cop. People pay you when they want you to do something and they pay you when they don’t. I hear the protection money in The Hills alone quadruples your pay.”
“Quit yipping. You had your chance like all the rest of us to take the Civil Service test in high school. I remember your friend, Bill, quoting you as saying, ‘I’m not going to sit around for twelve years at some diddly-paying job until I can earn the real credit. I want it now!’ Sound familiar?”
“It does. But I said it when we graduated Oregon State, not high school. But the offer from Nanogate just seemed too good to pass up. Now I’m not so sure.”
Carmine got one of her I’m-right-now-shut-up looks on her face. “Velcro your mouth and enjoy the music. At least pretend you’ll miss me from your bed tonight.”
“What? Where will you be?” he said, trying but not really succeeding to keep the three-year-old whine from his voice.
“Sorry, business trip to Tycho City. I told you about it a week ago.”
Despite the incredible beat of the music, Tony decided that his evening just tumbled into the gutters with the rest of the burns and filth.
“Yeah, and what happened to that frumpy old baggage you helped in the TriMet?” Carmine questioned, deftly changing the subject.
“I don’t have a clue. No one called, so I might be in the clear.”
“Good. That scare should teach you not to try to be Mister White Knight. It doesn’t line the credit account.”
“Probably right, but you wanna hear something even more strange?” Tony leaned forward over the table. He looked surreptitiously around. The volume of his voice dropped at least in half before he said, “She was carrying a box with a cat in it.”
“Eww!” Her face wrinkled up in disgust. “Can’t stand the things. Saw one at a zoo once. Filthy creatures. Fur everywhere in its cage. Should grind them all up for sausage. You ran it into the recycle, right?”
Carmine’s unexpected reaction stopped Tony. He fully intended to tell her the entire story and now she frightened him. “Uh…right.” Perhaps Carmine’s unanticipated trip profited him more than the loss of his bed companion suggested. Certainly tonight, of all nights, he’d have his hands full with Cinnamon, the name he’d chosen for his new charge.
For the next two hours he drank sparingly, unusual in and of itself, and listened to the band’s reverberations. Tony took the time to examine Carmine in a new light. Since fifteen she’d painted his life in some way. She sympathized with him while he lived out the letter of the contract to that bloodsucker, Pricilla. She stuck with him through the six years of his bachelor’s degree, another three for his master’s, his apprenticeship at Nanogate, and three years of seventy-hour weeks trying to make manager.
They shared fluids and beds anytime they could manage, but he didn’t love her, and she repeated, as often as he’d listen, that she didn’t love him, either. Tony never considered offering even a temporary marriage contract. They kept each other comfortable in bachelorhood as friends with many privileges.
Carmine’s prejudice now colored his views of her. Her normal warmth suddenly carried the heat of an icicle and her jocularity sliced like a knife edge. Tony couldn’t understand how she could even begin to harm anything as cute and loving as Cinnamon. A parsec of space suddenly warped in between them.
Anyone who paid attention from the outside could easily spot this one-sided gulf. Tony moved with the music without hearing it. He hardly said two words in as many hours. Carmine spent her time too engrossed in the band and watching the antics of the patrons to notice Tony’s lack of banter.
About eleven, Carmine turned abruptly and planted a bright red kiss on his cheek. The self-heating lipstick stained and warmed his flesh. “Gotta run, honey-bunny. Just enough time to get to Black Field.” Carmine parted the curtain and jumped down from the booth.
For the first time, Tony realized her beautiful body hid something callous. While she might not know it yet, this time she’d walked right out of his life. He grimaced as he wiped the still-warm lipstick from his face.
The Bananas finished their set. Tony looked around. While several acquaintances danced to canned music, for the first time none of them, male or female, could erase the cold emptiness he felt inside. He climbed down from his booth, to the pleasant surprise of a latecomer that just happened by the choice club real estate.
“Going home so soon, sir?” Jock asked as Tony exited into the relative quiet of the street.
“Yeah. Carmine had to run off to Tycho.”
“Yes, sir. I saw her leave.”
“Yeah, I’m just not feeling in the party mood tonight.”
“Well, you be extra careful tonight, Mr. Tony. There’s a level three riot just beyond the TriMet stop.”
“Thanks, Jock.” Absently, Tony wondered if Jock gave Carmine the same information. He gave his head a little shake of irrelevance.
“You might also want to avoid the TriMet Hub tomorrow morning.”
“Oh? What’s up?”
“Dunno, sir. But I wouldn’t want you to get hurt. Duck, sir.” Tony ducked just as a large metal projectile bent on mischief sailed over his head. Jock deflected it with his arms, not giving it another thought. Tony looked back to see three young kids running away into the darkness followed closely by two Metro officers. Just punks trying to get their kicks and maybe make a name for themselves.
“TriMet, eh? Where do you keep getting this information, Jock?”
“Oh, I hear things,” he said with a shrug that accentuated the biomechanical interface.
; “Well, I won’t press. You have a good night, Jock.”
“You, also, Mr. Tony.”
Tony avoided the small riot, probably over food rations, only twenty minutes later to encounter a mugger at his condominium door.
“Give me everything!” shouted a man sporting an unkempt beard and wearing clothes that should’ve been condemned. He carelessly waved around an old Sony Blackburn laser pistol. Tony barely broke stride as he pointed his left hand toward the man. A trio of tiny dart-like projectiles burst out of the end of his index finger at just below the speed of sound. The would-be assailant collapsed into a pool of filthy rags, bleeding out of a 16 centimeter hole in his chest. Tony nudged the pistol away from the reflexively jerking hand, shaking his head sadly. Another welf decided he couldn’t make it on the welfare rolls and tried to augment his pathetic income by murder, home invasion, and robbery.
“Just because you can’t see a weapon, doesn’t mean your victims don’t carry one,” Tony muttered in a derisive tone.
Without a second look at the horrific mess or the fecal stench that now arose, he opened his door to hear Cinnamon’s tiny scratches from the bathroom, where he’d kept her during the day.
“I’m coming, Cin.” As he locked and bolted the entry, he had a stab of fear.
What if someone had heard her? They could’ve called the Metros or maybe even Interpol! His trepidation lasted all of about three seconds. He checked the entry log and his personal security measures, finding no evidence that his privacy had been invaded. Nope, nobody was here. We’re safe.
“What a day!” he said. “I’m so—” he yawned wide, “—tired.” He kicked off his shoes, stripped his socks.
Tony released Cinnamon, playfully nicknamed Cin, from temporary prison. The tiny cat stropped his ankles, followed quickly by licking his bare toes. “Stop that, Cin. It tickles.”
Cinnamon looked up at him as if she understood. She lifted her tail and bounded off to some mischief.
An Eighty Percent Solution (CorpGov) Page 4